Spying on Uncharted 2

The other day a buddy of mine was playing through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, committing an 8-hour marathon of Nathan Drake and the Uncharted cast of characters, new and old.  Before I get into the gist of what I witnessed, this is my disclaimer that I did not play Uncharted 2, but merely watched!

Let me just say that Uncharted 2 looks great.  The improved graphical content from the first is a welcome addition to the game.  The sound isn’t half bad either; the slightly greater assortment of firearms blast with much stronger affect to believability.  The voice-work is top-notch, following in the footsteps of the first Uncharted, which is readily heard from the increased number of cast members in the game that receive some considerable screen-time.  The story, however, is a bit more farfetched than the game’s predecessor, but that is a minor miff at an otherwise grand and energetic tale of adventure; some of the most engaging storytelling I’ve ever seen, in fact.

My biggest concern with the game is, just as in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, the horrific difficulty present throughout the levels.  The friend of mine that was gaming was cussing-up a storm, after pounding dozens of rounds into hoards of baddies that, even on the “easy” difficulty, still managed to give a tough fight.  The skill curve, especially on the last boss, is uncalled for; my plea to the developer, Naughty Dog, is to please balance out your titles!

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is by no means a bad game; heck, it’s not even a good game, but a great game.  Tight controls in a visually stunning world with some quite witty characters to tell a grand action adventure make the game one fun enough to watch, let alone play.  My only word of caution would be to handle the difficulty with extreme caution!

Now, on current events, I’ve been gaming up on Deus Ex: Human Revolution in my spare time this winter vacation.  I’m unsure when that will be completed, but it is quite a blast to play so far.  Expect a write-up before then on Uncharted 3 (since I’m watching this one be played now).  Take care, and please comment if you have any thoughts!

• + Visual improvement with better sound.
• + Keeping the wittiness of the first title, even with a larger cast.
• + Tight controls.
• + Fun adventure story.
• - Hoards of cannon-fodder villains.
• A fix: Invest in more memorable opponents (e.g. Halo elites, Half Life headcrabs).
• - Forgot to correct the shameful difficulty curve first seen in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.
• A fix: Some quality time with quality assurance may be in order to balance this one out.

If Only Uncharted was Left Uncharted

Well, the plan was to marathon through all three Uncharted games with a friend over this long break at college.  We managed to pound-out the first game, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, but I’m not sure if we’ll get through the next two.  Here are some reasons why:

Rolling around protection, smashing buttons to reload or to aim or to seek cover, Drake’s blown to bits by ridiculously placed grenade snipers.  Attempting to aim - which only leads to hip-firing - gets my face plastered with bullets from suicidal maniacs charging my barricade.  Enough being said about that, the controls are a bit harsh to handle, not helping with the difficulty.  Set on Medium, the waves and waves of copy-paste enemies take a ridiculous amount of ammo to put down, straining already tight weapons - only a handgun and a rifle are allowed to be carried at a time.  It took my friend and I ten shots - ten! - to put a goon down.  All this is tough but forgivable, except that the game forces the player into kill-rooms, making it unable to proceed until insurmountable odds are, indeed, overcome (after much frustration).

But enough on combat; now to navigation!  I’m not a regular player of platformers, but the climbing and jumping of Drake had quite tight handling.  If all platform games work this nicely, I will have to delve into them more often.  The dark-side is that the background can be deceptive at points.  More than once, my buddy and I fell away, having tried to nab a ledge we saw that the game said wasn’t there.  

Past combat and navigation, the delivery of the story is top-notch.  The characters are witty, the dialogue skillful.  The unique persons of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune give an adventure that is easy to trace a journey through.  In regards to the tale the game tells, it’s a pleasant adventure for buried treasure.  Such a jaunt has not been heard of in this console generation.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune has a good story.  The game also carries off a solid platforming experience.  Where Uncharted falls off at is how it tries to be a combat game, and fails miserably, even with an unreasonable army of mercs spread along the path; that downside breaks the game into a series of frustrating and unbelievable encounters.  If a player can get past that, more power to them, but at least for this gamer, the rest of the Uncharted series very well may remain uncharted.

Take care with other games this holiday season!

• + Fun writing; adventurous dialogue.
• + Memorable and witty characters.
• + An unforgettable treasure hunt.
• + Good platform handling.
• - Deceptive level platform layout.
• A fix: Add more places to traverse, even if those areas don’t naturally lead to where the player is to head to.
• - Limited and hard to control weapon choices.
• A fix: Tighten the combat controls if combat is to be relied on so heavily.  Augment the weapon selection even a little more to allow for broader options – the PS3 can certainly handle it.
• - Generic enemies with numbers that are legion.
• A fix: Don’t substitute quality combat encounters with rushes of shallow cannon-fodder.
• - Unrealistic difficulty levels.
• A fix: Cure some of the previous ailments, and this one might just be solved!

Bioshock 2 Satisfies

The first Bioshock was renowned for its originality in design, its depth in story, and its harshness of moral choices.  Almost all features were carried over to the sequel, Bioshock 2; this is the best move imaginable… if only 2K Marin had left the broken pieces behind.

Since the delivery of Bioshock 2 could be gone into at great length, a quicker-than-usual brief is due.  The sound of Rapture (the underwater utopia turned dystopia where the game takes place) is old and wet; drips upon the character’s helm ‘tink-tink’ convincingly, the radios play clear and beautiful music, the guns boom with energetic fervor, and the voice-acting is spot-on.  Hearing the game makes Rapture a believable city in disrepair.  The graphics are swell if you don’t look too closely (I found some missing floors and some nasty texture loading issues), but fire and water spark and sparkle without fail.

Moving on to more gameplay aspects, plasmids (the ‘magic’ of Bioshock) are increased in number and uniqueness from the first game, lending to a colorful palette of destructive abilities.  The AI is OK, but don’t expect the cleverest of tactics to be used during the adventure.  The multiple enemy types will give a guy a run for their money early on, but that leads into how Bioshock 2 is troubled.  Scrounging for ammo and supplies keeps the areas alive, but after the first hour of gameplay, scarcity does not exist.  Throughout my adventure, I found myself swimming in money and bullets, never worrying where the next round of firepower would come from.  This would be great when battling the squads of depraved denizens of Rapture, but their squishy flesh rends, burns, and splinters like wet paper.  The plethora of expendables makes later portions of the game laughably easy, while making environment exploration more of a chore for the audio diaries (objects that give sections of game lore).  Even bosses and mini-bosses are like butter to hot bullets tearing through them.  This downplays difficulty significantly somewhere around the half-way point.

A final downside – though it can’t be called negative – would have to be the resemblance Bioshock 2 shares with the game it sequels.  In the first Bioshock, Rapture was a new dimension in gameplay and storytelling never seen before.  The originality from, well, the original brought a fresh adventure to gamers at large.  Bioshock 2 does many things right, but the purely novel scenario of the first game is not inherent in the second.  Is that such a bad thing?  Not really.  The enjoyment is there, but it’s a skin that’s been worn before.

All in all, Bioshock 2 is a game worth playing.  The depth of story elements and the vibrant play-space alone are reasons enough to give this title a run-through.  Though I did not engage in multiplayer, the solo campaign gave me enough of a time to fill 2 full days of explorative gaming.  So despite the disregard for serious difficulty, Bioshock 2 is seriously satisfying.  Take care, all.

• + Great sound; the noises of the city are tantalizing to the senses.
• + Pretty graphics that play off of the elements.
• + New and varied plasmid powers.
• + Adept narrative that conveys an evolving story within the world itself.
• + Weapons feel like they pack as brutal of a punch as they look.
• - Fairly cliché enemy types that deliver average AI.
• A fix: Evolve the algorithms used in AI development throughout the game to sharpen the response times of the NPCs.
• - Overloading the ammunition and currency system so much that it puts down the difficulty factor massively.
• A fix: Place fewer consumables in the environment.
• - The absence of the ‘new’ felt from the first game.
• A fix: Implement traits exclusive to the title without taking away from the gameplay of the predecessor.  Either that, or be a game coming from less famously ground-breaking stock.

To Dream of an Undead Nightmare

To create an entirely new campaign wrapped in the utility of a DLC is a daunting task, even for an astounding studio like Rockstar.  Creating a living, breathing world of monsters that delivers one of the best, if not the best, stories from an expansion is even more difficult, but Rockstar’s done it with the stand-alone zombie western Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare.

When first entering Undead Nightmare, I was dropped-off exactly at the midpoint of the original Red Dead Redemption game, enjoying the easy life set for me from the first game.  Though to know what happened before is helpful in grasping some of the relationships the characters have with each other, Rockstar delivers enough ambiguity to keep the relative histories vague for new players, while retaining the entertaining nostalgia veteran players have from the first game.  So armed with this inside knowledge, I begin.

Immediately, the game is filled with hair-raising action, as John Marston (the protagonist of RDRUM) battles his friends and family in his nightwear.  To uncover why his loved ones are attempting to maul him, he sets off to find associates from his past for a cure.  However, it is soon discovered that the undead are stampeding (ok, ‘shambling’) all over the western frontier.  This began a long and beautifully crafted campaign for my next 10 or so hours.

Initially, the world is quite unforgiving.  Hordes of undead soak ammo like sponges to water.  I found myself madly fleeing through the crowds to snag a bullet or 2 from foes finally laid to rest, all the while kiting a mob behind me.  Many times I got surrounded, eaten and beaten to a pulp in mere seconds of melee.  Even after more powerful and efficient guns are found late-game, with ammunition no longer a major crutch of play, it was easy to become stunned into bloody submission by being pulled off my horse, run-over by bullish zombies, and utterly engulfed in a throng of putrid, violent limbs.  Certain perks and steeds help Marston on his way, but no matter the unique brutality of some weapons exclusive to RDRUM, zombies don’t care if their buddies vaporize next to them, as long as the player ends as the main course.

 Galloping through New Austin, I was exposed to many branching theories as to why the world was in chaos.  The uniqueness of the ‘why’ Armageddon’s happening really speaks to Rockstar’s insight into the disorganization that may occur in society, and lends to a believable backdrop of the stereotypical zombie apocalypse scenarios modern culture holds.  Included are some tragically comedic breaks in the pressure of the plague, but those may be Undead Nightmare’s weakest points.  Some of the ‘humor’ is over-done in a way that almost caused me to feel bored, or made it apparent that the situation was beyond ridiculous.  There are points in the game where John Marston could easily save those he knows from undead consumption, but chooses not too; instead, neither ending their suffering before they die, or ending their damnation as undead.  This was not a flavor I am used to from Red Dead Redemption, thus is the only real deviation from the norm that partially subtracts from the game’s experience.

Overall, this one-disk, stand-alone game was truly a blast to play.  Having barreled through 100% completion, I feel that the West has been won, despite the hocus-pocus dealings of its inhabitants.  I can’t say that there is a plethora of stuff to do after completing the main story, but the things to do won’t make you feel worse toward the game in any way.  And heck, it is always fun to expunge zombies with explosive cannons!  So, especially concerning that this holiday season is coming up, I suggest nabbing this good game for no more than $15, even if the parent game, Red Dead Redemption, hasn’t been played (though, if it hasn’t, GO OUT AND PLAY IT NOW!!!).

But, before I go, here is something new I am going to try after all posts from now on: my ‘critique!’  Let me know how if this works, and take care.

• + Use of zombies plays to cultural stereotypes, instead of trying to hide the fact of how cliché it is.
• + A model of how to construct an apocalypse in history usually reserved for modern times.
• + Varied, one-of-a-kind weapons with quite pleasing effects of destruction.
• + Nostalgic enough for familiar players; ambiguous enough for new players.
• - Not much to do after the story is completed.
• A fix: Include an exclusive end-game monster or series of clean-up quests to keep the player engaged.
• - Overused, sometimes misplaced, humor situations that seem unrelated to the fiction of the world.
• A fix: Lend some of the classic RDR investment by the player into the cut scenes, so as to keep the gamer concerned, even if not providing as much tension.

Extracting Fear from Extraction

I was being railed down a corridor, see, just minding the business of finding every little ammo/health/secret item in the level that was smoothly flowing by, when a freaking necromorph popped-out of a vent to suck my face!  After a few hard shakes of the controller, the beast was beaten off, but was immediately joined by a frikken legion of zombies.  This fearful encounter is one of many frights in Dead Space: Extraction, including the emotion from your allies.

Dead Space Extraction is a prequel to 2008's Dead Space, taking place in the day before Isaac Clarke (protagonist of the series) arrives.  It follows – literally follows; it’s a rail-shooter – a detective leading a rag-tag group of survivors through the hellish confines of a planet-side colony and the halls of the Ishimura.  Frequenting common locations from the Dead Space lore (and some very new locales), anyone who’s played DS will swoon with nostalgia.

There are a few return characters as well gracing the game as the new persons you play as.  I have a beef, though, with these well-meant but poorly executed actors.  The first is, namely, that any person can easily see that these characters are just actors not paid enough.  During the most intense of exchanges, lines are delivered flatly, without conviction or urgency (something that a zombie outbreak would surely entail).   This is especially seen when one of the characters loses an arm, but is A-OK, running through the ship, single-handedly destroying zombies before getting to safety. The 3D models look worried/amused/confused/scared, but emotion is left behind in the sound booth.

Along with the places and persons of Dead Space, the reeking terror is back as well, despite the slow dialogue.  Necromorphs are killing everything, and Extraction places the player into positions that send familiar chills down the spine of the gamer.  This dreadful feeling has been long-missed since my last Dead Space 2 play-through.  With the usual jack-in-the-box thrills, the unending onslaughts of the dead, and tight-corner caution, this freak-fest will get the adrenaline pumping. These scares are only magnified by the harshness of controls (the game is meant to be played with a motion control device).  Scares here are great and of distinct Dead Space flavor, but this is only because the best characters (the necros) deliver the creepy atmosphere for play.

Overall, Dead Space: Extraction is a good game to play for those looking for an easily delivered thrill.  Without much character to the characters, don’t expect a solid narration when running through the ship to go along with scary encounters.  Don’t let the plastic personalities keep a horror lover from playing this game, though, but if a title like Dead Space, Dead Space 2, or similar title is available to play instead, a gamer’s priorities may need to be set.

In other news, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare is being played.  That title is already a blast to play, so it’s easily guessed how the review will be.  Until said review, take care!